'Secret Window': Recycled King

News-Times, The (Danbury, CT), Roger Moore THE ORLANDO SENTINEL

Published
1:00 am EST, Friday, March 12, 2004

"Secret Window" is a tribute to serial recycler Stephen King's gift for reworking themes from his most successful works and reselling them - and to star Johnny Depp's ability to find yet another character he can play without having to get a haircut.

For the 1991 novella "Secret Window, Secret Garden," King revisited the solitary, blocked writer of "The Shining" (1977), made him successful and gave him a tormentor, a la "Misery" (1987). And Depp plays the heck out of the writer, giving us mannerisms, twitches and an ongoing interior-exterior monologue to comment on what's happening and what he's doing about it.

Depp is Mort Rainey. He spends his days in a remote lake house in upstate New York, not far from
Gary Sinise
's place in "The Human Stain," we suspect. Writers have all the best real estate.

Mort is unable to cook up a new book, unable to cope with the wife (
Maria Bello
) he caught cheating on him or her new beau, Ted (
Timothy Hutton
).

And then a guy dressed up like a malevolent Mennonite shows up and accuses him of plagiarism.

"You stole my stow-ree,"
John Turturro
drawls in one of those accents that Hollywood thinks hark from the true South. Make it right, says the drawler named John Shooter, or "I will burn yore life and ever' person in it like a cane field in a high wind."

Well, if that don't beat all.

The threats become more real and downright bloody. Local law enforcement (
Len Cariou
) seems clueless. So Rainey calls in a menacing private eye (
Charles Dutton
, reunited with his "Nick of Time" co-star Depp). We learn that maybe Rainey has had this sort of trouble - borrowing others' words - before. Maybe the gumshoe can make the problem go away.

Screenwriter-director
David Koepp
("Stir of Echoes," "The Trigger Effect") tries to hide King's self-plagiarized plot points by keeping the tempo just a hair off the beat. Depp is an able accomplice, giving Rainey a twisted, guarded persona that is aggressively cute and clever. Everything that was effortless in "Pirates of the Caribbean" and :Once Upon a Time in Mexico" feels forced here, ad-libbed by an actor who thinks this is how movie stars protect their persona.

songbook and over-identified details such as cigarette and whisky brands. When Rainey insists that he would never use a nom de plume, King's fans can have a laugh, knowing the books he published under the name Richard Bachman.

None of this set dressing keeps the ending a secret, which you may have guessed just from reading the review. Suffice it to say that by the last act, the film has pretty much run off the rails.

But Depp is always an arresting presence, even without a haircut. "Secret Window" won't seem derivative to those who can't remember the stow-rees King stole from to write it. But all the cornpone in Mississippi can't make this go down like anything but year-old grits.